Think Tank: Gamepad Control

[qwertywwTOME]

Seems like a lot of the stuff I would've suggested, people have already posted here! I do have a couple of thoughts, coming to this game from Caves of Qud which has REALLY good controller support.

Movement could be based on jostick input + a button press to allow for easy diagonal movement/attacks (Qud does this by showing an arrow while the joystick is pushed in a direction, showing you where you're going to move, then moving/attacking when the player presses the right trigger). Personally I almost always rebind this to the right bumper since it's less annoying for repeated inputs, but your mileage may vary.

Using the d-pad as a cursor for the exiting abilities bar would be a quick and fairly easy way to do things, but I also agree with previous posts that some button combinations should be able to be assigned as 'shortcuts' for commonly-used abilities. Bumpers or triggers would be good to use as a 'modifier key' to tell the game to expect ability hotkeys instead of other inputs, and allowing secondary 'modifiers' like the d-pad on a controller would allow for some very fluid controls. There's a tradeoff to be made there between fluidity/quick play and precision. It's definitely possible to get the best of both worlds but I don't know how.

Ability targeting will probably not be an issue at all. The base game's auto-targeting is already really good. I would also suggest a mode which cycles between all visible targets, and a mode which lets you pick a tile manually, as both are useful in different circumstances.

One thing that would be nice is a hotkey for the right-click context menu, and a method to 'look' at other tiles as if you were mousing over them (maybe using the right-stick to select a tile). Context menus, in my experience, are very nice to use on controller, albeit not for things you'll be doing SUPER frequently. It'd be useful for taking a look at the stats of more dangerous enemies though, for instance.

That's all I've got, but hopefully it was helpful!